Abstract
The question of how much past do we need for having a healthy life has been most famously asked by Friedrich Nietzsche in his On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, written in 1873 and published next year. Here it is re-asked, 140 years later, to five respondents of respected reputation in the field of philosophy of history, namely Frank Ankersmit, Sande Cohen, Jan van der Dussen, Allan Megill, and Jörn Rüsen. The original dialogical form of the interviews, in which the question of healthy relationship between past and future has been also addressed, was transformed into continuous responses and preceded by some introductory remarks. Each of the answers gathered is unique but they all put emphasis on the proper balance between different dimensions of time for a healthy life of an individual. In addition, Frank Ankersmit comments on St. Augustine's thesis that I am what I remember, Sande Cohen pays attention to conflicting pasts of different social groups, Jan van der Dussen emphasizes the fact of unpredictability and uncertainty of the future prevailing today, Allan Megill explains the difference between passive and active forgetting, and Jörn Rüsen stresses the multidimensionality of the phenomenon of time and the neurotic dimension of accelerating modernity.